Real People, Real Skills: Six Years to Find Her Footing

Real People, Real Skills is a monthly series on NoodleFodder. Each installment looks at a true, publicly documented story of someone navigating real hardship — and the specific coping skills that helped them through it.

There was no warning.

The day after his birthday, he was gone. That’s how a university student described it in a piece shared through the University of Alberta’s mental health storytelling project — a sudden loss, no preparation, no chance to brace for it.

What followed was not a clean grief arc. It was a spiral. PTSD. Severe generalized anxiety. A bipolar 2 diagnosis. Grades falling. Friends being pushed away on purpose. Abusive relationships entered in the search for love and numbness simultaneously. Suicidal thoughts that didn’t go away.

“I began to develop bad habits to deal with my pain,” she wrote, “which included failing grades, losing friends by pushing them away, bad spending habits, and falling into some scarily abusive relationships all in the search of love, acceptance and something to help numb the pain.”

Six years passed. And slowly, she found her footing — not through a single breakthrough, but through something much less dramatic: a schedule. Structure. The daily, unsexy work of keeping herself regulated.

What structure actually does

When she describes what finally helped, she doesn’t name a single therapy or a pivotal moment. She talks about developing a routine that keeps her mental health regulated. About her sister, her friends, her boyfriend. About showing up for the day even when the day is hard.

This is not the kind of recovery story that gets made into a movie. But it’s the kind that’s actually true for a lot of people — where what worked wasn’t dramatic, it was consistent.

In DBT, this maps directly onto the PLEASE Skills: the practice of maintaining physical and emotional stability through the basics. Sleep at regular times. Eat. Treat illness. Avoid mood-altering substances. Get some movement. These are not glamorous. They are foundational. When your nervous system is dysregulated from grief and trauma, routine is one of the only things that tells your body it’s safe enough to calm down.

Structure is also a form of Opposite Action. When depression says stay in bed, getting up is Opposite Action. When anxiety says isolate, texting someone is Opposite Action. You don’t do these things because you feel like it. You do them because the feeling is lying to you about what you need, and you’ve learned to do the opposite anyway.

The people who stayed

She’s alive, she wrote, because of her older sister, her friends, and her boyfriend. She names them specifically. That’s not incidental — that’s the other piece of the recovery: Interpersonal Effectiveness. Letting people in. Accepting support. Allowing herself to be held up by her relationships even when part of her was pushing everyone away.

Grief after sudden loss has a particular cruelty: it often makes you want to isolate exactly when connection is what you need most. The people who stayed, and the work she did to let them — that’s as much a coping skill as anything in a workbook.

Where she is now

Still in university. Still struggling some days. Still in it. “I can go from feeling neutral to falling into the deepest despair,” she wrote, “but it hasn’t stopped me from living and moving forward.”

That’s not a tidy ending. It’s a real one. Forward motion doesn’t mean the hard days stop. It means you’ve built enough structure and enough connection that you can get through them and still be here on the other side.

Try this

If you’re in a hard stretch, look at your day and find one thing you can make consistent. Not a whole routine — just one thing. Wake up at the same time. Eat something at a regular hour. Go outside once. That’s it.

Routine doesn’t fix grief or trauma. But it gives your nervous system a signal that tomorrow is coming and you’ll be there for it. Sometimes that’s enough to build from.

This story was shared anonymously through the University of Alberta’s mental health community storytelling project. For more on the PLEASE Skills and Opposite Action, visit the NoodleFodder DBT Skills hub.